Monday, January 31, 2011
Kyle Baker: From Bullpens to Self-Publishing
Pictures: Seth Kushner
“I turned in the third issue and I finally got censored,” Kyle Baker laughs. We’re doing a panel at the King Con in Brooklyn on a chilly November day. The upstairs room in the Brooklyn Lyceum is chilly, but boasts an amazing view of Brooklyn through large warehouse windows. “I’m really pleased.”
Deadpool MAX
, the new comic book drawn by Kyle over David Lapham’s scripts, is an adults-only book about a smart-ass mercenary from the X-Men comics is wrong in so many ways that it boomerangs back around to being right. Deadpool’s sidekick becomes the bitch of a closet gay mob enforcer; Deadpool gets it on with a psychotic obsessive mental patient posing as his nurse; Deadpool fights a Nazi KKK. Deadpool MAX revels in its own wrongness that you need a shower afterwards.
, the new comic book drawn by Kyle over David Lapham’s scripts, is an adults-only book about a smart-ass mercenary from the X-Men comics is wrong in so many ways that it boomerangs back around to being right. Deadpool’s sidekick becomes the bitch of a closet gay mob enforcer; Deadpool gets it on with a psychotic obsessive mental patient posing as his nurse; Deadpool fights a Nazi KKK. Deadpool MAX revels in its own wrongness that you need a shower afterwards.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Sixteen Panel Grid: Warriors of the Dharuk
Stephen Lindsay has his hands full. The acclaimed indie writer/creator of Jesus Hates Zombies enters 2011 with no less than five books coming at us. One of his latest offerings is Warriors of the Dharuk, a four-issue, all-ages story written by Lindsay while watching his seven-year-old son, Ayden, at play. Dharuk invites readers into a world of animal warriors flavored by ancient Japan and delivers an action-packed first chapter of a great (but violent) comic book for young readers.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Transmetropolitan Celebration
Words: Seth Kushner
 |
| [Jim Calafiore] |
For 60 issues, over five years, the oddly bespeckled and heavily tattooed outlaw/gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem vulgarly trampled corruption in Warren Ellis’s and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan
.
. It’s been eight years since the cyberpunk/political series ended it’s run at Vertigo Comics. To mark the occasion, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has teamed up with the book’s creators to produce a hardcover charity art book, limited to a few thousand hand-numbered copies.
“I think there's a natural relationship between the subject matter of Transmetropolitan and the mission of the CBLDF,” says Charles Brownstein, the Executive Director of the organization. “Both are ultimately concerned with freedom of expression, and the need to embrace and defend it.”
Monday, January 17, 2011
Jennifer Hayden's IT’S SITCOM-IX!
IT’S SITCOM-IX!
I always wanted to live in a sitcom, where the hair and the clothes always looked perfect, family members didn’t try to kill each other, and no matter how fucked up the situation got, everything had to go back to being the same by the end of the show. And if shit got too heavy, all you had to do was wait for a commercial.
I didn’t become a television professional, but after years of writing, and then some more years of illustrating, I did discover comix. And recently, while I was working on a strip for UNDERWIRE, the webcomic I write and draw on ACT-I-VATE.com, I realized how much my work owed to the fine TV shows I grew up with.
Maybe a lot of comix artists feel this way. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because each UNDERWIRE story is short and self-contained, making it feel like a half-hour format. Or it could be because the characters are members of my family—my husband, daughter, son. Starring me, of course: the Mom.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the 21st Century: A Review
Words: Jared Gniewek
Before I begin this review of this mammoth book of Martha Washington stories, let me set things up properly with a statement regarding Objectivism and Ayn Rand’s works. I respectfully disagree. No more, no less. And it's cool for others, especially the fiercely talented, if that's how they see things, but not for me. So, that being said, I expunged the references to that philosophy and found the book a bit more palatable. Palatable? Actually The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the 21st Century
is every bit of awesome. Great artwork from Dave Gibbons. His dinosaurs are sweet and his spaceships are tight lined monoliths of dignified beauty. His compositions, as always, are perfectly framed narratives. Between that and a solid script by Frank Miller, we got comics royalty clocking in and making magic on almost every page.Monday, January 10, 2011
In with the New...Year
Due out in Spring of 2012, Leaping takes our Graphic NYC essays and remasters them into a whole new and unique experience, giving readers a cohesive tapestry of the history of comic books.
How does this affect the Graphic NYC site? Not very much, truth be told. While Christopher's cranking away on the book draft, he will take time to write a new GNYC profile on a monthly basis, and we're also planning on adding on an additional contributor (or two).
CHRISTOPHER: "One thing we've found in talking to everyone—from Joe Simon, to Jules Feiffer, to Art Speigelman to Paul Pope, and all the way up through Marvel CCO Joe Quesada or even newer talent like Kevin Colden—is that you can actually trace the development of the comic book through their personal experiences, be it on newsprint or an iPad. Beyond that, though, is that meeting all of these folks has been a helluva’ ride, especially since a few of them are personal heroes of ours."
SETH: “There have been so many memorable experiences. Hanging out on a Hell’s Kitchen rooftop with Frank Miller, in a Gotham alley with Denny O'Neil and in front of NYC’s Flatiron Building (The home of The Daily Bugle in the Spider-Man films) with Brian Michael Bendis has been a blast."
The deal with powerHouse comes as we wraps our second year online, and also caps an interesting year for the two of us. 2010 saw the publication of Seth's online photo-based webcomix series, CulturePOP: Photocomix Profiles of Real-Life Characters on Act-I-Vate.com, as well as the print birth of Christopher’s Graphic NYC Presents Dean Haspiel: The Early Years from IDW.
CHRISTOPHER: "On a personal note, it was the toughest year of my life: my father, Elliott Irving, passed away in late July as I was wrapping production on the Dean book. Graphic NYC nor Leaping could have happened without his support. As far as I'm concerned, honoring him means making Leaping Tall Buildings worth of sitting on my bookshelf next to the copy of Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes
that he gave me when I was twelve."
that he gave me when I was twelve." |
| Photo courtesy of WFLO Radio in Farmville, Va. |
SETH: "The signing of this contract is the accumulation of three years of work, (so far!). It's been a long road since that cold January day in 2008 when cartoonist Dean Haspiel and I had a conversation about a potential 'photo book on comics creators' at the now-defunct Rocketship Comics in Brooklyn. From there, Dean began hooking me up with other cartoonists to photograph, and then, a few months later, he connected me with Chris and that team-up begets our upcoming book."
Keep your eyes on GNYC: We still have more aces up our sleeve (Kyle Baker profile, anyone?) as we work on making Leaping reach the stratosphere.
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